remember when i constantly talked about “nostalgia for the present“? that was the spirit of this blog initially, but it has now become more about travels and central asia, which is probably not a bad thing since no one really benefits from my rambling memories.

I was reading some old notes and came upon this from November 2007. Funny how I don’t think about this as much as I used to, because some other things have layered over it. Funny things, time and memory.

“moving through vast stretches of the green tibetan plateau, i felt an incredible calmness. my soul was light; i wanted to laugh, and cry, all at once, for the beautiful loneliness of life. there my spirit was free, there i felt truly happy, truly alive. there are various such moments in my life, such brilliant precious points of time—a brief parting of clouds, light shining through and illuminating for a second the intersections between self and that great motion of existence. but such moments are by nature transient and fleeting. every other moment must be spent trying to recapture that sense of splendid being.”

chengdu city

the late sun sinking through the trees
brightens up my traveling clothes
i’ve come a long way through variegated landscapes
to this far corner of our known world
nearly everyone i meet will be new to me
and i can’t think of going home maybe ever again
this great river flows away to the east
like me it’s always moving
chengdu has city walls
fine houses behind them
the trees are green even in late winter
i’ve heard a lot about this city
listen, there’s a sound of people making music
that doesn’t cure my loneliness!
i turn to look at the bridge across the river
crows and even sparrows returning to their nests
how far away the central plains seem now
the crescent moon does not rise high
the stars have most of the rest of the sky
to compete among themselves
exile and travel are familiar stories
why should i let them make me sad?

in her dream she was in the countryside, in her grandmother’s village. she saw me at the end of a road with a snow-white goose in my arms. it was fall and a chilly breeze was blowing. i said to her, mama let’s walk to your grandmother’s grave, i have to tell you something. but suddenly my mom felt so tired (she hadn’t been able to fall asleep that night prior to this dream), she promptly fell asleep then and there. when she woke up i was gone; her relatives said they didn’t see me go to the grave or enter the house. just call her, they advised. no i can’t, my mom replied, she has a goose in her arms so she can’t pick up the phone; the goose will fly away. they waited for days but still couldn’t find me. my mother felt profoundly sad, knowing the last time she had seen me standing in the brisk autumn embracing a white goose, had truly been the last. she was relieved when she awoke and found it to be a dream; and yet thinking of that scene (shot as if in a film) even in wakefulness couldn’t shake the heavy feeling of sorrow.

what impressed me as she was telling me this dream was when she began the tale she said, i was standing somewhere beautiful, oh it was the countryside at my grandmother’s home, because in my dreams the beautiful places are always there! and there in kyrgyzstan, i thought about my mother’s past, her youth, a time when i didn’t know her; these are memories i can rarely access–and yet these were such a part of her coming-into-being; so much so that every beautiful place for her is always an echo of that road with those trees she loved as a girl going to her grandmother’s house in the country.

max penson’s photography documents uzbekistan in the thick of sovietization (roughly between 1920 and 1940). his photos are amusing and endearing; each picture reveals its delightful details upon closer study–they are images of cheerful socialist productivity,full of rich patterns, praising a giving land…

max penson was a belorussian jew who fled pogroms and WWI to kokand in turkestan with his family. he set up an art school and set out to capture the daily lives and activities of locals on film. they are pretty amazing… i had a hard time selecting my favorites from his very prolific portfolio.

Photos taken in 1956 in Uzbekistan by Jacques Dupâquier. Original post from English Russia.

an eerie and picturesque graveyard; i’ll probably write a post about it

the flat expanse of osh city as seen from suleiman-too

hiking in arslanbob

table is now a big cat!! but unfortunately he still tries to jump up four feet to bite and claw my arms

malika, grown up and beautiful

sisters pre-wedding

wedding rehearsal

preparing gifts for the groom’s family

mutual displaying of gifts between the two families; one very large bill

mini-bride and groom

the bride had to “hide” at a neighbor’s house to wait for the groom to come buy her from them (with real money); these were the neighbors

these were the wedding guests at the neighbor’s house

yoqimli ishtaha!

so bored

the official part

my friend yarkinoy and her super fat baby

the random dusty (but beautifully poplar-lined) road where the mysterious and semi-secret “usb incident” occurred (not sure if i can provide more info…)

how do i write about my return to osh here? writing about osh occupies my every day these days (subject of my thesis); i might just select some photos and ignore the harder issues that would only be presented too simplistically on a blog like this. but let me start with the dream i had the first night i got there.

i was with a group of dream companions and we were running from an evening terror in the streets. we had to be careful not to leave anyone by themselves outside. at one point, a companion and i were almost caught up with and the terror said to us, “what a tiring life you will have, constantly running from me.” we said, “everyone will die, but why should we want to die now by your teeth? we would rather the trudging days of life, let the sun beat upon our brow.” (i swear this is verbatim from my dream)

in the morning i told rano aya, my host mother, saying that i was chased by wolves in my dream. she said, no need to be afraid, the wolf is a good sign, it signals new friends.

it is obvious the dream was connected to conversations i was having earlier that day, about the dangers of going out at night in osh now (especially if you’re uzbek, the uzbeks say). i was at a loss what image to pair with this post, and appropriately i didn’t have any night-time pictures from osh. only this one, in the half-dusk in the mountains of arslanbob.

on my way to osh, i travelled through the province of farg’ona. it was a short, strange trip. we reached marg’ilon–a very “uzbek uzbek” town–famed for the yodgorlik silk factory where uzbek ikat fabric (atlas, adras) is still loomed. most of the other passengers got off here and because this was also the driver’s home, even though he’d originally said he would drive me to farg’ona town, he now strongly recommended me to get off in marg’ilon to “see the sites” and for the remaining passenger to hang out with me and be my guide. of course neither i nor my new uzbek-tajik buddy-by-force knew our way around. on our way to town center, our car glided by a mosque-mausoleum complex seemingly not far from center; it looked paradisiacal–fountains, greenery, and a promenade leading up to a nice-looking white mausoleum. maybe my memory has built it up, later happenings caused me to question the whole reality of this place’s existence.

i hopped out of the car with anticipation to saunter along the marvelous paths of a dead holy man’s palace, thinking perhaps this was some little tucked away gem of a place. but as my companion and i began to question couple market ladies about the mausoleum in order to orient ourselves in the right direction, they first looked at us with puzzlement before directing us to bus number 2. it seemed strange to me; the place had seemed walkable. the bus chugged along and still we saw no signs of that sepulchral wonder, my companion grew suspicious and made a note to the driver to stop when we got to the mausoleum. five more minutes and still no sign of halting. at this point we were out of the town of marg’ilon altogether, zipping pass corn fields and cotton fields. finally we were dropped off at a dusty intersection. my companion and i looked at each other, knowing something went wrong, but to hell with it and walked down the dirt road supposedly leading to “the mausoleum.” we ended up in one of those post-soviet central asian “relaxation places,” but a very very small village-sized one. there was one vendor selling ice cream. there were some old men sitting eating plov (made the way we would grill burgers at the park–public and open-air–except not with coals over a grill but in a massive wok over a twig fire).

after an ice cream, we questioned an elderly gentleman about the mausoleum. he led us along a slight wick of a way beyond the relaxation place into a reedy marsh. there stood the Mausoleum, dun-bricked and unassuming. i can’t even remember who lay in there. some local devout man (i think he was fat; or rode a donkey backwards; some such tale; i must be mixing in afandi stories). we had the old gentleman read an omin, to pay our respects. what WAS interesting was that we weren’t standing in the middle of just a reedy marsh, but in a reedy marshy graveyard. no one had bothered to trim down the weeds and plant matter in years so the place was whistling with loneliness. most graves were abandoned, perhaps forgotten–their headstones marked a more diverse past, of russians and germans and koreans whose descendants left a newly independent nation which no longer seemed to belong to them nor them to it.

my companion, fahriddin, and i took a bus to farg’ona town, walked around and had dinner. as we chatted, i recorded a little character sketch of him in my head. he was from farg’ona but worked in tashkent as a chef (meaning he was good at cooking huge amounts of plov); his legs were scrawny, but his upper body was strangely built; i can only think it is from the fast tak-tak chopping of carrots for plov in the restaurant. his dream now was to open his own cafe; but really he had dreamed of attending music conservatory but wasn’t able to get his documents in order at the right time (believe it or not, this is a real problem). he told me about his past unrequited love (her subsequent marriage to someone else–another very common story, though i usually hear it the other way around) and how his neighbors now talk about him in pity, walking around alone and melancholy; he told me the story of a beautiful but illiterate man, which was supposed to have a moral, but as with many uzbek anecdotes the moral was lost on me. he impressed me, because here was someone who was “not educated” but not at all like some of the typical “uneducated” young fellows i’d met (sleazy). throughout the day, he had loved repeating the phrases “the world is interesting and strange” and “people are every which way.” i said my thank-yous for his patience and companionship, spent the night in a “hostel,” aka bedroom in a russian woman’s unmarked apartment, and the next morning shuttled off to the kyrgyz border and to osh.

a note recorded while i was on the road in uzbekistan: on the one hand uzbekistan seems so familiar–like tajikistan–but on the other hand so different–the landscape rolls out like a carpet, all the kinks and bumps ironed out. out the window of a car driving from bukhoro to samarqand frantically searching for methane gas, the cloud show over the brown and green fields was marvelous.

the impossible lines in the photos are of cars waiting to fill up; this apparent shortage of gas was also attributed to the approach of independence day.

cute bed-and-breakfasts, touristy souvenir markets, awesome architecture, afandi statue, old town, old town, and more old town.

a favorite moment was when my friend and i went out with some of our young waiters from Lyabi Hovuz (the artificial pond-side restaurant, every guidebook’s go-to) and they asked us, “what have you seen in bukhoro?” “we’ve just been walking around the old town,” i replied. “what about our city’s other beautiful sites?” “like what?” i was curious to know, as far as guidebooks went, nothing much outside the old city had been recommended. one guy thought for a moment, “our movie theater!”

after the hookah place we headed to was closed early “because of independence day” (which, by the way, was three days later), they ended up taking us to some place which they only described as “the twelfth floor but so cold.” it was all that and nothing more.